Found in a mislabelled canister, the ‘Henonville Songs’ contains songs in Yiddish and German from interviews with concentration camp survivors at a French refugee camp in the summer of 1946.
The spool is part of a larger work by Dr David Boder, who interviewed at least 130 Jewish survivors after World War II to preserve the history of those who had endured ‘unspeakable horrors.’
Seventy years after the recordings were made, researchers have retrieved the voices from the antiquated wire spool, revealing songs that the Nazis forced their prisoners to sing – and the Jewish people’s songs of rebellion.
In the aftermath of World War II, Boder interviewed displaced survivors in Germany, Italy, France, and Switzerland, recorded on 200 spools of steel wire.
While much of the work has been archived at The University of Akron’s Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology since 1967, one spool was never found.
The recording containing Jewish songs from a camp in Henonville, France had been referenced in his work, but remained a mystery for decades.
But, digging through the three boxes in the archives at the Cummings Center to take stock of the collection, Jon Endres came upon a spool that had been entered into the system as ‘Heroville Songs.’
After digitizing the fragile recording, the researcher was ‘blown away’ by what he’d found, he explains in a blog post.
Read the full article by Helen Clark at The Marshalltown.